Newt Gingrich's fledgling presidential campaign was rocked Thursday when nearly his entire top staff quit at once, leaving the former Georgia congressman's bid for the GOP nomination in disarray.
While the former U.S. House speaker vowed to stay in the race, his campaign's Buckhead headquarters was cleared out and locked up Thursday afternoon with mail piled at the door. He is still scheduled to appear in a GOP debate Monday in New Hampshire.
“I am committed to running the substantive, solutions-oriented campaign I set out to run earlier this spring,” Gingrich wrote in a Facebook posting. “The campaign begins anew Sunday in Los Angeles.”
The en masse resignations, attributed to a difference over the direction of the campaign, also cost Gingrich a national co-chairman. Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue announced late Thursday afternoon that he is joining the campaign of former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty's campaign is being run by Nick Ayers, who ran Perdue's 2006 re-election team.
"Tim Pawlenty is a great man, he was a phenomenal governor and he is the person I now believe stands the greatest chance of defeating President Obama," Perdue said in a statement released by Pawlenty's campaign.
Gingrich's other national co-chair is former Georgia governor and U.S. Sen. Zell Miller. Current Gov. Nathan Deal is chairman of Gingrich's state campaign. Deal's press secretary said the governor had yet to talk to Gingrich, with whom he served in Congress.
“The governor understands the speaker and his wife are taking personal time together at the moment," Stephanie Mayfield said. "... We don’t want to comment until the governor has had the chance to speak to the speaker.”
Scott Rials of Atlanta, a longtime ally and one of the key aides to resign Thursday, said to his knowledge Gingrich never once stepped foot in the Atlanta office and has not been in Georgia since the state GOP convention in mid-May.
"There were disagreements about where the campaign needed to go, and [I] felt this was the right move. And wish him well," Rials told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Other staffers leaving the Gingrich team include campaign manager Rob Johnson and long-time spokesman Rick Tyler. Advisers in key early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina also stepped down, according to numerous media outlets.
Rials, who served as an aide to Perdue, said the split with his mentor wasn’t rancorous.
“It wasn’t a happy occasion, but it wasn’t an angry occasion. It was a professional disagreement. We shook hands and agreed that that was just a difference. Really, no one is mad at him, except that many of us see it as a missed opportunity. He doesn’t see it that way,” Rials said.
The resignations are the latest in a series of blows to Gingrich's campaign that began at the outset. After a debut in Macon at the state Republican convention, Gingrich’s campaign immediately ran into trouble when, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he criticized U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to revamp Medicare, an effort that had just been endorsed by the House Republicans he once led.
A revelation that he and his wife Callista had once had a bill at Tiffany’s that could have been as high as $500,000 only served to underline Gingrich’s problem with the GOP’s evangelical base – his three marriages.
Gingrich was the only major Republican contender who skipped last week’s gathering of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition last week. Citing his previously scheduled vacation, Gingrich offered a video greeting instead.
Finally, as he struggled to raise money, Gingrich jetted off for a two-week Mediterranean cruise with his wife.
According to one Gingrich employee in Washington, D.C., who was told of the discussion between Gingrich and his staff, the timing of the cruise was a problem.
"Taking a two-week vacation in June when you badly needed money after the Paul Ryan appearance was pretty bad," said the staffer, who is not authorized to speak to the press.
The campaign's rocky start impacted fund raising as well and limited the campaign's ability to compete nationally.
"Newt has never been, on a personal level, a big fund raiser," said Matt Towery, CEO of Atlanta-based media and polling firm InsiderAdvantage. Towery is a former Gingrich aide and long-time adviser. "That was never his strongest suit. I don't think up to this point he has quite understood that a presidential campaign is really two things: Either you're dialing for dollars all the time or you're staying in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina."
The aides who resigned, Towery said, "were pretty much trying to get him to sign on to that kind of concept."
Kennesaw State University political scientist Kerwin Swint, who has long questioned whether Gingrich would be a serious candidate, said constant movement from crisis to crisis for his campaign undoubtedly hurt.
"He lost a lot of support," Swint said of the aftermath of the Ryan imbroglio. "It shocked a lot of people. People began to question what kind of candidate he would be. Not only money, but people who may have supported him."
Gingrich has not yet had to file records with the Federal Election Commission detailing how much money he has raised, so it's unclear what the impact has been. But polls have shown him trailing other candidates, even in Georgia.
A poll conducted by Towery's Insider Advantage released June 3 showed Gingrich in Georgia with 12 percent, good for third place. The leader in Georgia? Former CEO and Atlanta radio host Herman Cain with 26 percent.
But Cain said Thursday that Gingrich's problems are not unique.
"What Newt is experiencing is what every campaign goes through and that's growing pains," Cain told the AJC. "I don't think that opens the door for me to be the unfettered favored son [in Georgia]. It's just one of the bumps in the road that most campaigns hit."
Recent history proves that point. In 2007, several top aides to U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., quit, yet McCain regrouped and won the GOP nomination for president in 2008. U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., suffered a similar setback in 2003 when he fired his campaign manager in November but went on to win the Democratic nod in 2004.
But Larry Sabato, an expert in presidential politics and professor at the University of Virginia, doesn't believe Gingrich has the same ability to rebound.
"He should drop out before the voting begins if he doesn't want to get embarrassed," Sabato said.
Too late, said Bill Byrne, a former Cobb County Commission chairman and a Gingrich friend. Gingrich's campaign ended, Byrne said, when he slammed Ryan's Medicare plan on national television.
"Political people realize his campaign is over with and he has self-destructed," Byrne said. "Those who signed up now realize that."
Staff writer Christian Boone and the Associated Press contributed to this article.
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